The semiconductor industry has experienced rapid growth due to improvements in the integration density of a variety of electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.). For the most part, this improvement in integration density has come from shrinking the semiconductor process node (e.g., shrinking the process node towards the sub-20 nm node). As device dimensions shrink, voltage nodes also shrink, with modern core device voltages trending toward less than 1 Volt, and input/output (I/O) device voltages under 2 Volts.
Non-volatile memory (NVM), a type of memory that retains stored data while not powered, is often embedded in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) logic processes, and typically requires high programming voltage for operation. In many NVM applications, a word line (WL) decoder drives high voltage on a word line for programming an NVM cell, and low voltage on the word line for reading from the NVM cell.